


100%

by fluorescentgrey



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Angst, Asexual Character, Dark, Drug Dealing, Drug Use, Lots of Twin Peaks References, M/M, POV Second Person, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-31
Updated: 2017-05-31
Packaged: 2018-11-07 03:17:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11050185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: The thing is to walk as though you’re in a Sonic Youth song circa 1992. So the thing is to walk as though you’re in “100%.” The jacket is its own fucking currency. So you stop wearing the hat because it strikes you that it clashes.





	100%

“One hundred percent of my love  
is up to you, true star” 

— Sonic Youth

\--

Practicing. Lying in bed in the basement of a split-level on the Southside sleepless in the long night practicing at the shadow of the bookshelf against the far wall in the streetlight and the moonlight through the torn Venetian blinds. Fuck me. Touch me — kiss me. Put your hands on me. You shut your eyes and trail your fingertips along your shoulder and your upper arm so softly in the darkness like a moth’s wings. 

\--

In a Google Doc hidden in several sub-sub-subfolders: 

_I want you to teach me how to play guitar. I want to walk with you in the woods. I want to take your dog out for walks while you sleep in late. Bandage your bum ankle. Make you fucking cookies and dinner. I lie in bed at night imagining because I can’t sleep that we walk into the desert together and never come out…_

\--

Whatever. Monday — in a booth at Pop’s with the girls who are acting like they’ve just discovered sex (perhaps they have). Across from you it feels like two twin lightning bolts (perhaps they are). They weren’t at the pep rally that afternoon and noting their absence gave you a sort of nuclear fission of a something you couldn’t identify. Betty has started wearing her hair down. 

“Is this,” she’d said, “is it okay?” 

“Of course — yes. Of course. I’m happy for you.” 

“Are you really?” 

“Yes. So much.” 

Perhaps this had come out dickishly but it wasn’t a lie. I’m fucking sorry, you almost said, tried to say, wrote down in fact in a letter you never gave her, I’m sorry I couldn’t give you what you want/need, I’m sorry I didn’t ever really even know what that was; I tried, just so you know, I really did try, but you deserve someone who will try harder… 

\--

At school every day. The thing is to walk as though you’re in a Sonic Youth song circa 1992. So the thing is to walk as though you’re in “100%.” The jacket is its own fucking currency. So you stop wearing the hat because it strikes you that it clashes. The thing is to be Den(n)is Johnson or Cooper instead of Capote or Joan Didion or whatever wry observational witness you imagined yourself at one time. You ransack your dad’s trailer until you find the plastic baggie of weed duct-taped to the underside of his sock drawer. Thus is additional currency both literal and metaphorical. The foster family you’ve been placed with won’t let you up from the table until you finish dinner. Unfamiliar care. When you notice your foster mother has paired your socks you sit on the end of the bed and cry. 

\--

“How’s your dad?” 

“Still in the hospital. How are you.” 

He’s never going to get out is the thing probably. “Fine.” 

“Are you really fine?” 

_It hurts to be around you. More reasons than one. It hurts like death._ “Yes. I’m really fine.” 

He just looks really good. On the porch in the late light. Hurts like a brick through a window. 

“You look — that jacket on you, man.” 

“Thanks.” 

“How about you sit? My mom went out to get pizza.” 

“I couldn’t, you know, impose…” 

“Shut up. Never.” 

So you sit. “How’s school,” he says. 

“We’re reading _Slaughterhouse-Five_ in English class.” 

“Isn’t that one of your favorites?” 

“Yes. Probably one of the greatest American novels.” 

“I haven’t read it.” 

“You’ll thank me when you do.” 

“But how is it — how are the other kids?” 

“Fine. Especially ‘cause — ” You chin over your shoulder at the patch on your back. “Imagine if I went back to Riverdale High like this.” 

“Jesus. It’d be like _Grease_.” 

“My car sucks though.” 

“Are you ever going to come back, though, do you think.” 

“I don’t know.” 

“We all miss — ”

“Yeah. I miss you too.” 

_Too much. Too much — fuck_. _It’s like you want him to know. Do you want him to know?_ He’s looking at you with the softness. Piteous devouring softness. Obviously solution is 1) dissolve into chair 2) run away 3) cruelly change subject. 

3) “How’s it going with Veronica.” 

“How’s it going with Betty?” 

Probably it isn’t funny. But you both laugh. _Thank God_. 

\--

V goes next. “Is this — is it okay?” 

“Yes, yes, I told Betty. Why wouldn’t it be okay?” 

“Because — well. It was kind of a quick turnaround. And Archie’s put out about it.” 

“Roni — really it’s fine. I’m fine. I’m happy for you both.” 

Veronica takes a red-lipped straw-sip of double chocolate milkshake. “Can I ask you something?” 

You don’t say anything but she asks anyway. 

“Betty said — don’t tell her I told you. She said she thought kissing you made you nervous.” 

“What?” 

“So I just — I want to make sure you’re okay. That nothing, you know, nothing happened.” 

You liked to be around her for the warmth and brilliance and her investigative surety and her sort of reflexive belief in you which few had ever really shared and so you had figured, maybe that means this. So it really didn’t mean that but she seemed to like it so you kept it up. 

In the Google Doc: 

_This comes from being thrown out by everyone in my life. I am so afraid to lose you (any of you). Maybe I wouldn’t do anything but I would do almost anything and that terrifies me too. And so does the thought of any of you knowing how much it feels. Or the thought that you would need something I couldn’t give you._

“Nothing — Roni. What do you think?” 

“She just said she thought you acted very coldly. She wanted you to be her first.” 

“Well, virginity is a social construct.” 

“Jughead, most boys would be — ”

“I’m not most boys.” 

Veronica’s eye roll should be canonized. “Shut the fuck up. You’re more of one than you think.” 

\--

Lying in bed. Not practicing. Something’s wrong with you, the stupid thing is saying. When this stupid thing happens it lays on top of you and breathes in your face like a drunk. It curls its whole self around your head and then it bleeds concrete down onto your chest and it presses and wrings you like a wet cloth. Something’s wrong with you. Why do you think no one can stand to keep you around? 

No one loves you and you’re going to be alone forever. If he knew how you wanted him he would never speak to you again. Do you think anyone could want you in that kind of way or really any kind of way come to think of it? 

Why are you such an unforgivable fucking piece of shit to anyone who has ever cared for you? They try and try. But you know this because you know your father — you can only try for so long. 

The only way out of the stupid thing is through and you know this. So you think of the old guilty comfortable things: laughter in the darkness. His arm pressed against yours from elbow to shoulder. Laughter. His arm around you in the forest such that you could feel his heartbeat. When you woke up on the air mattress on his floor and found he was watching you but then he looked away and you never spoke about it. That night — he was talking about something or other and you were trying to play his guitar, and you knew about four fingerings. _Fingerings_ , you were thinking, chillingly. You were trying to play “All Apologies.” I wish I was like you… easily amused… And you could feel him staring at the back of your neck and it felt like fishhooks through your spine and all your guts tearing asunder along the perforated line dividing the pieces of you screaming to be touched and not to be touched. The left side with the hand on the fretboard like, put your fucking hands around my neck. Put them wherever you want, it’s what I want. And the right side with the hand over the sound hole like, please just look at me and stop there. But please look at only me. 

\--

The trick is to walk like you’re in Sonic Youth’s “100%.” The trick is to keep in your head most of the time that line from _Closer_ : “Really you should know the goal of my work is a Dorian Grey type of thing… I make you look terrible, and I start to look really good…” 

\--

“Didn’t you used to go to Riverdale High,” says Travis in the hall on Thursday between gym (which you cut) and Spanish (in which you sit in the back of the classroom and doodle until the whole margin of the page is black). 

In another life, you almost say. It feels pretentious. Besides it was only a month ago even though it feels like years. “Yeah. Why?” 

“Want to make a delivery? I forgot I have a dentist appointment…” 

You follow him into the bathroom and exchange the baggie of weed in a funny handshake by the cracked mirror. “When and where?” 

“The dumpsters by the old Drive-In property. 6pm. It’s some football player.” 

“Great.” This, you think, will be fun, if you survive. 

“Make sure he gives you $40. It’s good shit. Medical. From Oregon.” 

“I can give you the cash tomorrow in Social Studies.” 

“No, you keep it.” Travis pushes his glasses higher up the bridge of his nose where the lenses magnify his eyes like fishbowls. His leather jacket creaks. “Consider it an investment.” 

You cut pre-calc too and leave school at 2:30. In the parking lot you find someone’s keyed your car. Sitting on the bleachers is Travis’s girlfriend Ursula, who’s smoking a cigarette. “One of those lacrosse bros,” she says. 

“What?” 

“Who keyed your car. He had that stupid stick.” 

“Right. Thanks.” 

“I didn’t see his number but it was probably Troutman. He’s a psychopath.” 

“Really.” 

She whispers something in your ear that makes you cringe. She smells like pot and frying oil, because she works at the Southside Diner, which is like the demon echo of Pop’s, which is where you’re getting dragged down to, where Travis and all them hang out after school and on weekends. “Watch out for him,” she says. 

“I appreciate it.” 

“You want a cigarette? You’ve been staring…” 

“Yeah, sure.” 

You put it in your pocket with the weed and your matches. Drive across town the long way through the trees. 

\--

In the mirror in the bathroom at Pop’s a sort of different stupid thing is looking at you through your eyes in the frosted reflection. There’s no sense to your face, says this thing. Something’s wrong with you. You look like your parents’ son but worse. Like an alien. There are weights on both ends of your mouth pulling sucking down like whirlpools dragging your face hollow. Your features are misproportioned and asymmetrical and shuffled strange. Buck teeth, widow’s peak, sharp edges. Alien and dark and intense. So really it’s no wonder — all of it is no wonder. Something’s wrong with you, which you know, and it manifests partially physically. It’s not so much ugliness as it’s a kind of invisible bruise. Something inside you is rotting. Can you feel it? 

In the brittle-black neon shadows with the leather jacket and your black flannel shirt you think you look more _Twin Peaks_ than _Grease._ In the mirror is the shadow you out of the Black Lodge living inside your body. “How’s Annie,” you whisper. Loud in the silence. Take hold of the edges of the sink ungrounded by the cool and wet ceramic and think for a thrilling second that perhaps the best course of action would be to slam your head against the glass. 

Out in the diner they’ve long since scrubbed the old Andrews blood out of the grout. Pop looks at you differently and he doesn’t ask you what you’re working on anymore. 

The thing is also that you can’t write. After everything the Blossom filicide manuscript seems trite and ridiculous. You subsequently attempted character studies of students and teachers at Southside but bailed when you reread them and they seemed outrageously vanilla. So since then (two weeks) you’ve just been writing abstract amorphous emotional bullshit in the Google Doc: 

_When you were AWOL for a while it was the worst I’ve ever felt. I thought I was going to die. I felt like someone had stabbed me in the chest and then pulled the knife out and shoved an icicle in the wound. So maybe that should’ve told me something. To think you didn’t want to be around me anymore on top of everyone/thing else. Honestly it felt even worse when I found out what it was. I couldn’t figure out why you would want to be with her more than with me. Complicated manipulative scenario etc you’ve since explained re: sex / intimacy / monstrous shared secret. But how could it be better I was thinking. Lying in bed at the Drive-In staring at the projector shadow imagining we had done that road trip together after all. If we had done it I was thinking you might’ve told me, let’s not stop. Let’s drive to New Mexico. Let’s drive on and on until the end of the road. And of course I would’ve said yes. Swimming in the rivers, bad radio, night driving, thunderstorms, wind shaking the tent, stars, campfire, and laughing, and your arm around me, like, waking up with your arm around me that’s all I want. All I ask, is it so much?_

It’s 5:45. So you pack your things up and take the rest of the coffee to go and walk over to the dumpsters by the old Drive-In. They’ve long since knocked down the projection booth where you used to sleep and carted the machinery over to the Bijou where it’s on display in the lobby like a saint’s relics. In the pale evening shadow of the remaining cinderblock menhirs are cigarette butts and empty beer cans and one or two gummy used needles. You’re thinking of your dad lying on the couch, passed out. Taking his boots off for him in the milk-blue light from the TV playing SportsCenter or Jeopardy. On the stereo he’s got _The Doors_ : this is the end, my only friend, the end of our elaborate plans… 

In your mouth Ursula’s stale menthol tastes like snow. Your mom putting IcyHot on your back after you fell sledding. Veronica’s hot chocolate with a little neon-green creme-de-menthe. _I want to make sure that nothing happened…_

“Jug?” 

The voice from behind you. Flat across the long field. Your heart does the most horrible thing it’s done in weeks. A missed leap and a long long very long fall. A shattering at the bottom. This looks like a scene in a movie, you’re thinking, so it must not really be happening to me. Across the gravel lot his cheeks are flushed in the bright cold. The glow of the last sun in his hair and skin. He crosses his arms over his chest very slowly. Beyond the parted lips ( _fuck_ ) is a heavy soft silence. 

“Arch.” 

“What the hell are you doing?” 

“Surviving. What the hell are _you_ doing?” 

“Sur— is someone making you do this?” 

“How much does anyone make you do anything in high school.” 

“This isn’t time for your fucking — cryptic sarcastic bullshit. What the hell are you doing _selling drugs_?” 

“Well what the hell are you doing _buying drugs_?” 

“It’s just weed!” 

“Yeah. Still.” 

“It takes the edge off. If you must know.” 

“It takes the edge off what?” 

“What the fuck do you think? I can hardly eat,” he says. “Come on.” 

“Your dad?” 

“You know it would mean something to him if you visited.” 

“Is he — ”

“Conscious? Most of the time. He’ll probably live. It hit some — I don’t know. Which organ. You would probably remember if you’d been around.” 

“Sorry.” 

“Yeah. Me too. Whatever.” He rubs the back of his neck. “What’re you doing, Jug.” 

“Taking after my — ”

“Don’t say that. Come on. Be real with me for one second.” 

The way he talks to you sometimes like a feral animal. Come down. Come here. Come on. Come eat this out of my hand. Come take whatever slow-acting placebo of ambrosia I can stand to give you. 

How light he made you feel even when you were in a fight. As though you were an angel. Like he washed all the darkness from you when he was near you and you felt clean. It didn’t feel like a lie to laugh. Everything bad that had ever happened to you floated. 

In the Google Doc: 

_You can’t know how much I care for you. So I’m a fucking shit to you on purpose_. _And I always have been._

“They said they’d look out for me. So I have to look out for them. So — quid pro quo, as Clarice Starling would say.” 

“You don’t have to — this is your life. Your future.” 

“I have straight Cs, Archie.” 

“So I guess you do want to be your father. After all that.” 

“I guess,” you say. It tastes worse than the stale menthols. “Do you want what you came here for or not.” 

He doesn’t say anything but eventually he reaches in his pocket for his wallet. 

\--

Lying in bed. Practicing. Then your phone vibrates against the nightstand. 

**_Archie_ ** _: sorry about everything i said today. it’s been really hard u know_

**_Archie:_ ** _i know it’s hard at ur new school and ur under a lot of pressure too. i’m worried about u tho_

Then the blink blink blink of the grey ellipses flashes a while and stops. You stare at the messages for a while and finally attempt something: 

_r u stoned_

**_Archie_ ** _: yes. doesn’t make me insincere_

_i know_

_thank you_

_i’m sorry too_

_it’s a lot. just a lot. not enough room for it all in my brain._

**_Archie:_ ** _r u stoned 2 lol_

You laugh. Echoes a little in the tiny room. That stupid thing screaming in your ear to be careful. To tread as lightly as is humanly possible — to never open any of yourself up. Already at the Drive-In you’d gone too far. 

_no just in mood for self reflection_

**_Archie:_ ** _r u really alright at school_

**_Archie:_ ** _veronica keeps saying she's worried about u but she won’t tell me y_

**_Archie_ ** _: god i wish u were back at riverdale i can’t deal w them without a mediator_

**_Archie:_ ** _do you sell drugs to veronica?_

_no. that would be something_

_she’s a meddler_

_maybe u should start eating lunch in that cupboard under stairs_

**_Archie:_ ** _where u used to sleep?_

**_Archie:_ ** _noooooo too sad. lol_

That had been a different sort of place to practice. The way the thick still air smelled like industrial-strength cleaner and locker room and nightmare sweat. Stillness. This is where you will be forever, said the stupid thing in those days. Hiding yourself away. Making yourself very small. For the general public good. You put your hand on your belly under your shirt and imagined someone was holding you. Knees nested knees and hips and the heartbeat against your spine. Tick tock. 

**_Archie:_ ** _if there’s anything i can do to help u_

**_Archie:_ ** _promise me you’ll tell me what it is_

I don’t know, you type out, delete. I wish I knew. But you send, _ok_. 

\--

Wherever Veronica goes “Walk Like an Egyptian” manifests aurally like a spell. It’s on now in the car on classic rock radio out of Duluth. She’s reapplying lipstick and in her arching her neck toward the mirror her turtleneck sweater shifts enough you can see in your peripheral an ecstasy of love bites. Not so much jealousy as a kind of observational confusion. You hadn’t known Betty was the sort. She liked to kiss your neck and you liked it when she did that more than you liked most things she did to you. But it had never been more than kisses. You wonder if you might’ve liked that — might’ve liked it if she had bit a little harder. If you would’ve let her do that. What you would have thought about how you looked in the mirror if there was that kind of physical evidence on you. 

“Is it true,” says Veronica flatly, “that you’re selling drugs.” 

“Did Archie tell you?” 

“No.” 

“How’d you find out?” 

“I have my sources.” 

“Do you want me to get you something?” 

“Maybe some molly at some juncture but not right now. The point is, are you sure there’s nothing you want to tell me?” 

“I’m sure. I’m not — V. I feel like you think I’m like, damaged.” 

“Aren’t you? Isn’t that what you’re going for?” 

“I mean, not badly. What do you mean I’m _going for_ — ” 

“I don’t know. Like, the aesthetic. You look hurt all the time. You’ve always looked hurt since I met you. And you tell me it’s not about me and Betty but — ”

“It’s not — for the nth time. Not about you and Betty. Not about Betty at all.” 

“Then what is it?” 

_Something’s wrong with me. I’m a ghost or an alien. No one loves me and no one believes I’m fully real. Most people treat me like a disposable temporary sidekick en route to some romantic permanence. I’m in love, love love, real sucking love, real drowning love, with Archie, and I also want him to never know, and I never want him to touch me. I hate how cruel I’ve been to him and I hate that it’s necessary. Something’s wrong with me and no one sees it. I can’t even see it. And it doesn’t have a name._

“It’s, you know, it’s my dad, V, as fucking usual.” 

“What’s he done now?” 

You make something up about a mandatory minimum sentence. Turn away from her so she can’t see the lie in your face. 

“Archie’s worried about you,” she says. Gingerly, gently, like she knows this aches. “He talks about you every day.” 

“Probably just to get his mind off what happened to his dad.” 

“No. I don’t think so.” 

You’re quiet, but she’s looking at you expectantly. “I don’t know what you want me to say,” you tell her finally. 

\--

Sometimes you want to ask her what it was like. What he was like. What kind of sex he wanted. 

You’re lying in bed looking at the ceiling. The moon comes through the window patterning like a spiderwebbed windshield the shapes of the branches in the tree outside but sometimes it’s dark enough you can see the impressionist ghosts of glow-in-the-dark plastic stars once there having been peeled away. 

You can’t imagine him with yourself or Veronica or anybody else, you just can’t, there’s like a wall. So you wonder how he jerks off. Probably hard and fast. Aggressive and almost angry. Sweat, skin. An open mouth. Like a wound inside your head you can touch it for a second then you have to pull away. Eventually it becomes a sort of endurance project and you dig your fingernails into it again and again. It hurts and is almost unwatchable but you can’t — like a car wreck. Like so much else. 

You close your eyes and touch your mouth with your fingertips. Salt skin. First just inside your lip and then teeth, tongue. Pressure. Velvet soft. A kind of swoony golden feeling melts through all your limbs like butter. You can’t think of him anymore. Just air. You can feel your heart beating. Probably the whole world can hear your heart beating. 

\--

You go out to a party Saturday night with Travis and Ursula and smoke too much pot and spend half an hour throwing up bile in the frozen garden having a panic attack in the fetal position but at last they come and find you and put you in the car and bring you to the Southside Diner. Burnt coffee, yellowish ice water, and a BLT soggy with limp, rubbery cold bacon dropped percussively on the table on front of you. Ursula touching your back almost nervously. “What happened?” 

You feel wrung out like with a bad hangover. When your dad used to get up at two in the afternoon shaking from the chest and radiating outwards. Travis is texting someone across the table but he looks up with more intrigue than concern. 

“Just you know when you’re already thinking too much and then getting high makes you think even more.” 

Everybody knows, is what the stupid thing had been telling you, pouring its wet sticky concrete all over you, all inside you, everybody sees you, and everybody knows. Everybody knows that jacket doesn’t fit you and they know why. They know why you cut class and go to Riverdale to hang out at Pop’s at all hours of the day and night desperate for a glimpse… And they know that you can’t write. And they know, most of all, most incontrovertibly they know, as most incontrovertibly he knows, that you love him. You after all have followed him around like a lost puppy since grade school. Trash that got lucky in the district rezoning. Desperate, thirsty, ugly, rotting boy. 

“What were you thinking about too much?” 

“Old flame.” 

Travis perks up again. “Yeah?” 

“Yeah.” 

“How old?” 

“The oldest.” 

“So it’s over now?” 

“As over as it’ll ever be.” 

“So not over at all.” 

“No. Not over at all.” 

You press the heels of your hands into your eyes. Black space reflecting shattering light. “You should eat,” says Ursula. 

\--

The trick is to walk like you’re Sonic Youth’s “100%.” The trick is to get a little or a lot high before school behind the gym. Re-read the assigned chapters of _Slaughterhouse-Five_ in a kind of numb haze smoking one of those shitty fucking stale menthols whilst Travis and Ursula make out aggressively, accidentally throwing elbows into your side on occasion. 

In the Google Doc, transcribed out of what you scrawl in the back of your notebook effervescently stoned in second period Social Studies: 

_Mirror. Self. The good one is in the Lodge and can’t get out._

_Maybe I should see a doctor._

_My importance to everyone I love evaporates drop by drop. Am I doing this to myself? Have I always?_

_It’s not so easy just to say, open up. Don’t be so cold. Because logically I know. But I can’t. I’ve tried._

\--

Archie’s out front of Southside High on Tuesday leaning against his dad’s truck. Letterman jacket and big black Doc Martens. He seems to absorb and reflect all the attempted intimidation directed his way as though it were sunbeams. It’s just as well because Troutman slashed your tires on Monday. 

“What’re you doing here.” 

“I was at the hospital. It’s on the way back. Get in.” 

You do. There’s a moderately disconcerting number of Pop’s coffee cups strewn around the seats. “How’s Fred.” 

He starts the truck with a jumping galloping roar as familiar as your own heartbeat to you now. “He got up and walked with me today. Just down the hallway but.” 

“That’s great. That’s really great.” 

“Yeah. Progress.” He sighs. Rubs his forehead. “I don’t want to talk about it.” 

“Okay.” 

“You ever drop acid?” 

It kicks you like a boot in the teeth. Almost shockingly hilarious. “Arch. No. Have you?” 

“What about shrooms?” 

“ _No_ , Jesus. Why?” 

“Just checking.” 

“Are you asking me to — ”

“No. I don’t know.” 

“Cause probably I can get some. If you want some. They use shrooms now to treat psychological disorders.” 

“I don’t want any of that. I’m just curious.” 

“It’s only been a month,” you remind him. “I haven’t, you know, totally gone full George Miles.” 

_The good one is in the Lodge and can’t get out…_

“I don’t even know what that’s in reference to.” 

“Dennis Cooper’s _Closer_.” 

“Haven’t even heard of it.” 

“Yeah. Don’t read it.” 

He laughs. “I feel like you’re a filter through which things pass.” 

Delicate fission of energy through you, your heart. Laughter in the dark. “What’s that supposed to mean.” 

“The world always fucking hits you like a ton of bricks and you catch all of it and then some pieces pass through to us. It means you’re tougher than all of us. It’s a complement, Jug.” 

“It’s a veneer,” you tell him. “The toughness. It’s the jacket. I’m very soft.” 

“Well, I know that.” 

“Do you really.” 

“Yes.” 

At a stop sign he looks at you. Smiles. The sweetness. You have to force yourself to compose your face. Stone. The snow. Think about the cigarette in your pocket. The lingering headache from the afternoon comedown. And the holes in your socks. And the little baggie of pills you’re supposed to sell by Sunday night. So he looks away and pulls the truck forward again. “Where are we going,” you say, though you think you kind of know. 

“Back to your dad’s place.”

“Why?” 

“Because no one’ll be there and we can smoke. I have weed. And we can really talk.” 

“Oh. Okay.” 

“We can go to Pop’s after. My treat.” 

“Alright, sure, Arch.” 

“You didn’t have other plans did you?” 

“No.” 

“With your, you know, your new friends.” 

Torture. It’s flurrying just enough outside that it sticks kisses on the windshield. This is torture. You press your temple against the cool glass. “No. No plans.” 

“Are they taking care of you like they said they would.” 

It gives you a yearning chill, to hear him say that. “Not really. My tires got slashed yesterday.” 

“By who?” 

“This fucked up jock Troutman.” 

“Why?” 

“Who knows.” 

“I thought you belonged here and these were your people. And you understood them.” 

“Archie — come on.” 

“We all want to help you. Okay? We want you to come back more than anything. All of us.” 

“You’re just sick of third wheeling with the girls.” 

“That’s only part of it, idiot.” 

“What can you possibly do to help me go back.” 

“Find you a foster family on the Riverdale side. I’ve already investigated. There are a few.” 

Torture. He’s looking at you. Torture. Eat your fucking fill, half of you is saying. Fucking devour me. The other half wants to open the pickup door and dive out onto the steep shoulder of the road. You glance at the speedometer — 40mph. Archie drives responsibly. Maybe you’d get out of it with just some broken ribs. “Are you going to vouch for me with CPS or what.” 

“I don’t know. I have to talk to my mom. She used to be in family law before she had me.” 

You don’t dare say anything. I can’t come out now, you should tell him. I’ve always been on loan to you from this chthonic mirrorworld like some fucked postmodern Persephone… 

“Jug, say something. Don’t you want to come back?” 

“Yeah, I do. More than anything.” 

“Then — ”

“Listen, let’s not talk about it. Thank you. And your mom. But let’s not. Okay?” 

When he furrows his brow so tightly the scar between his eyebrows looks like a sort of symbolic rift. “Okay.” 

\--

In the Google Doc: 

_I think I’m missing a piece of myself. There’s something that just isn’t there. Maybe this is one of those things whose growth is stunted when you have a hard home life as a child or teenager. A cycle. I think that thing that’s missing is some kind of empathy. So maybe I’m a psychopath like Troutman is._

_The hard thing about the thing not being there is that I really don’t even know what it is. So I don’t know what I’m supposed to miss and I don’t know how to pretend like I’m not missing it._

When you found out about all that with him and the music teacher you couldn’t sleep for a week. Thinking of him fucking gave you a migraine to the extent you didn’t leave the Drive-In for a whole weekend. The thing was how many ways you could twist it so you could flagellate yourself with it. It was exhausting. Every ten minutes there was a new one and eventually it just became the fact you’d made it about yourself. 

You looked at your reflection in the mirror. New descriptors for the compendium: haunted, hollow. 

\--

At your dad’s trailer Archie lets himself and you in with the key under the flowerpot with a deft ease that suggests he’s done this several times in your absence. Inside it’s as spotless as it had been left after you’d cleaned up from trashing it but the carpet smells rotting and there’s so little homeliness to it anymore that it feels resoundingly uncanny. There are some beers in the fridge your dad bought before it all and you open them against the familiar divot in the counter while Archie rolls a joint on the coffee table. 

“I thought you didn’t drink,” he says. You ignore him and sit far enough away on the couch that your knees don’t touch to watch him roll the joint. It’s not the same weed, you realize, that you sold him. The truth is you don’t like drinking and nor do you really like smoking cigarettes but it’s something to do with your hands. “I’ve got to show you something, Jug,” he says, lighting up. 

“What is it.” 

Your hands touch like flint and tinder when he puts the joint between your fingers. He gives you a look you can’t decipher then he unzips his backpack and pulls out a heavy manilla envelope. The contents he spreads out upon the coffee table necessitating the removal of the beers to the floor. 

Most are still images captured from the security feed at Pop’s and the gas station next door showing the shooter in his black balaclava and his red Volvo station wagon. The police report of the vehicle’s theft three days previous in Grand Rapids and subsequent abandonment and torching in state forest land near Ash Lake. The police report of the shooting itself. Ballistics results on the bullet and the gun, bought secondhand at a shop in Fargo with cash. “Where’d you get these,” you ask, filtering through them. 

“Called in a favor with Kevin.” 

“Really?” 

“No. I stole his keys.” 

“So you think you’re going to solve this one too.” 

“That’s the thing,” he says. He’s begun to arrange the documents like a puzzle he’s completed before, and you watch, kind of hypnotized, trepidatious. “Not without help. Not without you.” 

You take a hit off the joint and pass it to him. “What kind of help.” 

He’s watching the smoke curl out of your mouth. Devour me, you think, as in the car, more confidently this time. Just try and let’s see what happens. 

“The police have a suspect,” he says, finding the picture. “He used to be a Serpent.” 

The picture’s cut out from one of Alice’s articles in the Register. You don’t recognize the guy but he has the jacket on. _James P. Murray, arrested for disturbing the peace at a screening of_ Mulholland Drive _at the Drive-In last Friday…_

“I could ask if my dad knows him. I’m visiting on Thursday.” 

“I was hoping maybe you could take me to the Wyrm.” 

He passes the joint back to you and it tastes like his lips. Smoke, sour, sweet strawberry milkshake. “I’m not quite, you know, there yet,” you tell him. 

“When do you think you’ll be there?” 

You take the baggie out of your jacket pocket and drop it on the table. Past caring. “Probably if I sell all these by Sunday.” 

He looks at them — about thirty flat teal-blue tablets — then at you. “Sunday night then.” 

“Maybe if you help — ”

“Roni can help. They want her to DJ Friday nights at that club now. She wants your help with the playlist but she’s nervous to ask.” 

“Does she still think I’m — ” 

“Yes.” He takes the joint back from you. “Anyway you should tell her you can do that and one better.” 

“I don’t know any dancing music.” 

“What about when you were listening to — what did you call it — ”

“Minimal techno. And no. That’s not like, Riverdale teen nightclub music.” 

“It will be if there’s molly.” 

“I guess so.” 

“So you’ll take me.” 

“To the Wyrm?” 

“Yeah. Sunday night.” 

Do you want me to come back or what, you’re thinking. There is a threshold after which you know you cannot claw yourself out of this. Otherworld. He passes the joint back to you. Probably more is a bad idea but it’s hard to care. “You ever watch _Twin Peaks_ ,” you ask him, sinking into the couch. 

“You’ve asked me that a million times.” 

“So you still haven’t? It’s on Netflix.” 

“ _Blue Velvet_ scared the shit out of me when we watched it on your birthday at the Bijou.” 

“ _Twin Peaks_ is different.” 

“Is it as scary?” 

“In a different way. And not to me. Probably it’ll be for you. But maybe not anymore.” 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” 

“It’s about how people have evil things in them. Evil sides. And so do places.” 

“Sounds familiar.” 

“Yeah. So maybe not so scary anymore.” If you weren’t so stoned you wouldn’t tell him. But anyway, whatever. “There’s this thing — it’s hard to explain. In the show it’s called the Black Lodge. It’s like, this supernatural place, evil place. The dark pieces of you are in there. Or sometimes the good piece of you is trapped in there, and the evil piece is in the real world. So I feel like that’s happened to me.” 

“You don’t have any evil pieces, Jug.” 

“Bullshit.” 

“No it’s not. I’ve known you since we were six. You don’t have any evil pieces.” You can’t look at him. Might cry. _It’s like you want him to know. He can’t know._ “You don’t have to take me there if you don’t want,” he says. “And you don’t have to sell these if you don’t want.” 

“I owe it to your dad to try. If that’s how it has to be then it’s how it is. Things are different now. It was like a bomb that went off — Jason I mean. Percussed us into an alternate universe.” 

“Can’t argue with that. Is that bit in your manuscript?” 

“No, you know I kind of gave up on it.” 

“Why? It was fucking good.” 

“True crime’s a little cliche.” 

“Come on, Jug.” 

“Yeah. I guess it’s more — I know how it felt. We were there. We lived it all. I can’t write it with the same feeling. Something about it won’t translate out of my head. Out of my memory. Which is another thing that makes me feel like maybe I’m in the Black Lodge.” 

“I’m in there with you. If you are. I don’t even know what it is.” 

“We’d be talking to each other backwards.” 

“Maybe we are and we just can’t tell.” 

He’s doing that thing again. Come on. Come here. Come down. Come over. Come with me… 

“So I’ll take you,” you tell him. “To the Wyrm. Sunday night.” 

“Are you sure?” 

“Yes.” 

“Are you really, you know, really sure — ”

“Don’t ask me again or I’ll say no.” 

“Okay. Thank you.” 

“Yeah. Don’t wear your fucking letterman jacket this time.” 

He laughs. “I won’t. That was an egregious mistake.” 

“What are you going to do if you see that guy?” 

“I don’t know.” He takes a deep breath. He’s looking at his folded hands in his lap. A year ago you might’ve dared to touch his shoulder in some kind of sympathetic energy transfer but that was a year ago. When you trusted yourself — when you weren’t afraid. _What the fuck happened_ , says the stupid thing, bleeding out of the stoned fog. _To think it was his not speaking to you for two months that caused you this grievous and humiliating injury_ … “Probably something stupid,” Archie says. For a moment you find you’ve forgotten what exactly you’ve asked him. “But I can’t — I can’t just leave it.” 

The expression with which he is regarding you now is probably classifiable as desperation. Because, you realize, with a twisting kind of horror, once you would’ve done something to calm him down. 

“Maybe you’re right,” he says. “Maybe the good — or at least the old, you know, the old us, both of us, are trapped somewhere. And this is — I don’t know what this is.” 

“It’s what you have to be — what we have to be. To fucking deal. It’s alright.” 

The whole room and perhaps the whole universe and certainly the whole town, the whole history, all of it, has shuffled down, shuffled up, all the space deleted, all the old decaying files, compounded, condensed; just you two, on the couch, and somehow despite your best intentions his knee is touching yours. “Yeah?” he asks. Softly. Hardly a sound just a mouth-noise. 

“Yeah.” It sticks at first. “Yeah. It’s alright. Arch — ”

The fact of his mouth, suddenly. The fact. His mouth. His hand at the shoulder of your jacket. Wet as you remember. He’s less sweet than Betty — less gentle. A hand at your jaw presses his thumb into the button that opens you up. But you can’t — won’t — close your eyes. You feel frozen to the core of yourself. He’s kissing you. Holy Christ he’s kissing you. His tongue touches your lip. He tastes like smoke and a strawberry milkshake. 

This is what you want, says the stupid thing, shell-shocked, howling, for God’s sake this is what you want. Isn’t it? This is what you want. This is what you want. This is what you lie awake thinking about every night. Why you can’t sleep, why you can’t eat. This is written behind your eyelids when you’re stoned and dozing off at school. This is what everyone in the county clear to the Canadian border has read inside your mind — this is what you want. This is what you want. And this is what you need to want if you can’t stand for him to leave you again so close your eyes and fucking relax. 

“Are you alright?” Right against your mouth. Sharp air. And the honey eyes. 

“Yeah. Surprised.” 

“But good — ”

“Yes. Good.” 

He kisses you again. Slower. Like drinking from you, like a chalice of wine. _Let him in for the fucking love of God._ But you can’t. 

_Something’s wrong with you_. 

“What is it?” 

His big soft eyes. His thumb against the pulse in your neck pushing in against the slamming vein. 

“Nothing. It’s nothing.” 

“You’re so tense.” 

“Surprised. Like I said — ” 

“We don’t have to. If you don’t want to.” 

“I want to. I do, I want to.” 

He kisses your jaw and your neck where his thumb was. Scrapes his teeth there not enough to bruise. “That’s better,” he says. 

You can feel your breath and your heartbeat where his lips are. “What?” 

“You like that better.” 

“Yeah.” 

He pushes your jacket off your shoulder so he can kiss your collar. Your hand at the back of his neck. This close you can smell the mothballs in his letterman jacket. Wet wool. Woodsmoke, boy. Good, you think, this is good, enough, at last, this is enough, just this, this stillness, half lying together on the couch in the divot of a thousand drunken sleeps, in the cold, in one body… His open mouth at the cords and tendons in your neck just breathing. Then he touches your belly where your shirt’s ridden up and you turn entirely without intending to ice again. 

He pulls away as though shocked by an electric fence. “What’s wrong?” 

“I don’t know.” 

“Don’t you want — ”

“I do.” Grasping for verbs for what you are and yet none fit. “I’m in — I have. I want.” 

“Then why are you afraid?” 

“I’m not — ” 

“You’re so tense. And Betty said — ”

“Jesus. Did she tell everyone?” 

“Just me and Roni.” 

“So, everyone.” 

“Jug — it’s because she’s worried about you. She thinks — ” 

“Nothing happened! Nothing. I’m just — I don’t know why. Just — come on. Don’t stop.” 

_You’ve practiced this. This is what you’ve practiced. It can’t be so bad. It’s only him._

“Arch. Don’t stop. Okay?” 

He leans in and pulls you toward him by the collar of your jacket and presses his mouth against your neck again. It’s supposed to be this fast, you’re telling yourself, your heart, your brain, and your throat is supposed to feel closing, that’s love, lust, desire, longing, etc., it’s all there, it’s all — his hand wraps around your ribcage. In the latices. So warm you can feel it through the flannel shirt. And you let him take your jacket off you. _That was the veneer_ , says the stupid thing, _you’ve just admitted it; what do you have left of the armor now?_

_Nothing, nothing left._

His hand at your belly makes you cringe again and this time he hesitates but doesn’t stop. You suck in a breath against his collar — his clean sweat. Floral detergent. Woodsmoke, boy. Home. You can feel his knuckles just above the waistband of your jeans. Skin a little ragged, sharp bones. 

_Touch me, you’re supposed to say_ , _you’ve practiced, tell him —_

His mouth finds yours again and you close your eyes. You can’t find the words in your throat nor amidst all the screaming in your head — _open up open up open up and tell him this is what you want —_ and then he has your belt undone clattering seeming very loud against the button and his hand is — his hand — 

So then everything clears out into the silent wasteland ecstasy of that word which is _Stop_. 

Incredible peace. Like moving in a dream. You get the heels of your hands into the muscled pockets of his collarbone and shoulders and exert one iota of pressure and he throws himself away from you as though you’re a hot stove. Which doesn’t really feel much better. His face is in high color and his eyes — “Are you alright?” he asks, too loudly. 

“Yeah.” You touch your mouth like you might take your hand away and see blood. “Yeah, I’m alright.” 

“Fuck. _Fuck_ , I’m fucking — ”

“It’s not you. Don’t even — it’s not your fault, okay? It’s mine.” 

“What’s — ”

“We shouldn’t — ” You reach for him and kiss his temple and he grabs your arm between elbow and wrist and so you keep kissing his face, his forehead, the scar between his eyebrows, slow, like a blessing, his ear, his hair… He says your name kind of brokenly. It fucking hurts. “I don’t want to talk about it,” you tell him. _I don’t even know if I can. I don’t even know what it is._

He kisses the soft inside of your elbow where there’s a funny freckle. You wrap your arms around his neck and his skull. Hand in his hair. His skin is fever hot against yours, against your mouth. “Let me up,” he says, not meaning it. “Let me up so I can take care, um, of — ”

“No, just do it here.” 

“Are you — ”

“I am sure. Don’t ask me again.” 

“I won’t even take it out.” 

“Fine. Whatever.” 

You watch him undo his belt and his jeans his heart your heart slamming against-inside your skin his skin and with the sound he makes when he first touches himself your stomach drops and twists. He takes your hand to his mouth and kisses your palm, your wrist, watching you, soft eyes. Come here — come on. Come down. Come with me. Here you are crushing kisses weakly against his hair. Your breath won’t fit inside you. Not in this fucking cold house, this fucking evil town. This fucking evil world. 

\--

In the Google Doc: 

_As much as I can love I do love you. With every intact piece. This I know. As far as I am capable. 100%._

\--

“There’s something wrong with me,” you tell him after. 

Him lying there on the couch with the placket of his jeans undone. “No there isn’t,” he says, turning away. Exhausted. 

“Yeah, there is.” You can’t stop now. “I don’t know. You’re the only thing I think about. And I think I love you. But I can’t — it’s not even fear. Not really. It’s just wrong. It’s like, you have everything. All my love. But that’s as far as it goes.” 

He turns back toward you again. It’s like a lightning bolt. He wants to touch you and you can tell, but he won’t. “Do you think it would ever,” he presses his tongue against his lower lip. Tries again. “Do you think it could ever be more?” 

“I don’t know.” 

“How do you not know?” 

“I can’t imagine. You know. More.” 

“Not — sex, or…” 

“Not that.” 

“Then what can you — what do you imagine.” 

“Just being close. Close to you.” 

“You are close to me.” 

“I can’t explain it. I can’t. Closer than that. But not so close as — ” 

“I get it.” 

“Do you?” 

“Yeah.” 

“Is it okay?” 

He sighs. He’s staring across the room and eventually you realize he’s looking at your reflections in the turned-off TV. The snow outside on the windowsill. The photographs on the coffee table. “I don’t know,” he says. 

“What don’t you — ” 

“I can’t. That’s not enough.” 

He reaches for your open hand on the couch and turns it over tracing the lines inside it across your palm. 

“How can it not,” you try. Not really wanting to hear the answer. “Arch. How can it not be enough.” 

He looks at you this time as though some heretofore undiscovered sun you can’t see is dawning inside you. A kind of quiet awe, and not unshocked. “You just — ” He sighs again. Looks away. “You just don’t get it, do you.” 

\--

At night in the upstairs bedroom at the house on the Southside whilst downstairs your foster mother watches her soap operas you look at your face in the mirror until it becomes too ugly to bear the sight of. The corners of the mouth dragging down. Stoned cold eyes. Sharp, intense, dark, alien, haunted, hollow. Something bruising a little red under your jaw like cherry juice in a lost summer. 

In bed eventually you realize the taste in your mouth is blood from biting the inside of your lip. Your mouth tastes like him. You grope for your phone on the nightstand and do it before you can convince yourself otherwise: 

_i don’t know what to say and i’m sorry_

_i really do love you as much as i can. i think this is the most. i know it’s not enough and you deserve enough so. it’s alright and please don’t feel like it’s your fault_

_maybe this will help. it’s where i put everything i feel instead of talking_

You send him a link to the Google doc. Then you put your phone down and stare at the ceiling. 

\--

Sleepless you watch the dawn turn blue pockets inside out of the night which develop as in darkroom chemicals into the cold light of day. The cold shower. The walk to school. Cold. The trick is to walk like you’re in Sonic Youth’s “100%.” _I stick a knife in my head thinking about your eyes_ … 

Travis is at your locker which has been graffitied with nonsensical phrases probably considered by jocks to be insults. “How’s it going.” 

“Fine. I got a hookup for those pills.” 

“Baller. Is that a hickey?” 

“Yeah.” 

“Who — ”

“I don’t want to talk about it, Travis. What’ve you got that’ll black out my entire brain for like four hours at least?” 

“Cindy Rice sold me all her Ativan ‘cause she needs an abortion. But you didn’t hear it from me.” 

“Of course not.” 

He presses one of the little hexagonal white pills into your hand and you go into the bathroom and swallow it dry in one of the stalls. Halfway through English suddenly you weigh nothing and the world is still and calm. 

_The good one is in the Lodge and can’t get out,_ you think. _And you’ve just sent him your bloody heaving soul._ But neither really makes you feel much at all and nor does the nerve-scraping of the dry-erase on the whiteboard when the teacher writes in fluorescent orange marker, _Everything Was Beautiful And Nothing Hurt…_

It turns out this stuff lasts all day. At lunch you bum one of Ursula’s cigarettes. You’ve got a brown bag lunch in your locker but you can’t eat. She watches you smoke for a while and finally she says, “Did Travis give you an Ativan.” 

“What? Yeah.” 

“How do you feel?” 

“Not bad.” 

“Don’t get too used to it,” she says. “The withdrawal sucks.” 

You don’t go to your sixth period class and instead walk in the woods at the edge of the property. In about ten minutes your toes go numb but you don't care. There’s an abandoned shed about a five minute walk in at which freshmen have attempted seances. With the Sharpie in your pocket you draw a crown at the head of the flame-blackened patina sourced from the red taper candles long since melted into the concrete floor. 

Black ghost. Black Lodge. You check your phone again. Sit on the floor and scroll up through your text messages from Archie back into the amorphous whatever-time before when it all was normal. Or as normal as it ever was with the two of you which was not altogether that normal to begin with. 

**June 14.**

_i want to attempt this navigation all by map and compass and stars_

**_Archie_ ** _: why would u want to do that_

**_Archie:_ ** _when u have inconceivable capability in palm sized machinery_

_rhymes_

_lol_

**_Archie_ ** _: fuck off lol_

_put it in a song_

**_Archie:_ ** _watch me_

_anyway i found my dad’s old atlas is why i’m telling u_

_so i’m teaching myself_

_u can join me if u want to gain an apocalypse survival skill_

**_Archie_ ** _: i am going to mooch off u when the world ends we’ve discussed this_

_ya which is why u need to keep in my good graces. limited space in my graces_

**_Archie_ ** _: rhymes_

**_Archie_ ** _: lol_

Through the blunt and numb sedative haze you consider the possibility that perhaps you always knew you would end it like this. 

You show up halfway through seventh period and can’t find the motivation to go to class so you wander the halls for a while and pick at your lunch in a secluded stairwell before you finally throw it out with a single bite taken out of the sandwich and the apple. You go to eighth period and ninth via muscle memory alone and stare at the window and not through it. 

You try the thought: _Something’s wrong with you._

Like this your fog-dull brain thinks: _Okay. Whatever._

If this is the Black Lodge after all perhaps it has to be. You sketch the jagged pattern in the back of your notebook until it breaks through the pages. Perhaps Travis will sell you more hexagonal pills in exchange for whatever molly you manage to sell by Sunday or maybe you can buy them from Cindy Rice herself though of course you have no money. But bespoke English papers are also currency. 

Troutman rams your shoulder in the hallway. Travis and Ursula are at her locker and her hands are in his back pockets. She gives you a wink she doesn’t mean. The trick is to walk like you’re in Sonic Youth’s “100%.” The trick is — the trick. There is no trick. Just surviving. Apocalypse skills. Take a step forward. And another step. And another. Breathe. The sun on the tile floor in the hall having split through the heavy clouds. 

He’s out front in his father’s truck where he was the day before. Ringing blue and gold. Color and light, and the heavy boots. Sallow sorry thing about his eyes and mouth. It breaks your fucking heart, which is good because it means you still have one and it’s still working. 

“Did you get my texts.” 

“Yeah, I did. Are you alright?” 

“I took a sedative.” 

“Yeah. Kind of jealous.” 

“I can get you some maybe.” 

“I think it’s alright. Want to get in the car?” 

_No_ , something’s saying. But also _yes_. 

“I was thinking we should go to Pop’s,” he goes on. “I forgot I said I’d take you out.” 

“Take me out.” 

“Yeah.” Nervously, a laugh spreading on his face, in his voice. “Do you need me to talk slower — ”

“Fuck off.” 

“You fuck off. Get in the car.” 

So you get in the car. 

“I can teach you, you know,” he says, starting the engine, clunk and rumble, and the light spreads out across the parking lot, wild in the snow like dropped jewels, unbelievable benediction. Not quite looking at you. Just with you, watching. “How to play guitar.” 

**Author's Note:**

> this story is rooted in my experience of being ace and taking forever to figure it out. i hope you can pardon its glaring personal exorcism quality!  
> i'm [here on tumblr](http://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/)


End file.
